Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Saturday, September 10, 2016

Marcin Wrona | Demon

inner demons

by
Douglas Messerli

Marcin
Wrona (writer and director) Demon /
2015, USA2016

Marcin
Wrona’s 2015 Polish film Demon is a
fiercely eccentric work using several different genres. Many critics—I believe
mistakenly—have described the film as a horror or ghost tale, and certainly it
does have some elements of those genres, in particular a great many skeletons
rattling in the closets of the Polish landowning family at the center of this
work. It is also right out of Yiddish folklore, replete with a dybbuk and
possession. There are also a number of absurdist-like and very humorous
elements akin to a great many of Polish short and longer fictions. But
primarily it is a sophisticated political study of both the highly anti-Semitic
Poland of World War II and today’s continued desire among many Poles, including
their current government—who has recently outlawed references to the Holocaust “death
camps” in their country—to white out Poland’s haunted past.

Living in London as a Polish émigré, the
“hero” (or perhaps we should describe him as the “victim”) of this story, Piotr (wonderfully played
by the Israeli actor Itay Tiran) meets the lovely fellow-countrywoman Zaneta
(Agnieszka Żulewska), and quickly falls in love. She desires a traditional
Polish wedding, which as Wrona’s wife, Olga Szymanska describes it, often lasts
up to 4 days: “There’s much alcohol,” she wryly comments, which often results
in a kind communal insanity. And in this sense, Wrona’s film shares yet another
genre, that of the drunken banquet film such as Wojciech Smarzowski's The Wedding.

Although Zaneta’s parents are somewhat
disturbed by the short period of their romance and by the fact that Zaneta has
not chosen some “nice Polish boy”—even though Piotr is of Polish descent and
speaks the language fluently, he is still considered an outsider—they
nevertheless plan the huge celebration in a large barn on their crumbling
estate, which they intend to pass on to the married couple.

The
outwardly joyful Piotr enters this community—now primarily a territory
destroyed by strip mining and built up after the war with Stalin-like housing
developments—excitedly, even planning to help to reconstruct their local bridge
which has been destroyed during the war (suggesting that he must work as an
engineer).

Accidentally, while searching out the
land surrounding the house, he encounters the remnants of a body. Perhaps, he,
himself, suspects what he doesn’t want to know, that these remains are of some
World War II victim. And we quickly covers his discovery over with soil without
saying anything to his fiancée of soon-to-be parents-in-law.

The wedding is performed and the
celebrants retire to the large bar to drink and dance away the night—and
perhaps several days and nights after. The beautiful young couple mix with
guests, including Zaneta’s brothers, one of whom had introduced the couple to
each other back in London. A friendly professor Szymon Wentz(Wlodzimierz
Press)—the “invited Jew”—gets up to speak, boring his now half-drunk audience
with his academicism. The local priest and doctor are also in attendance.